you must be logged into iSpot to log into the forums
So what? (I never log out anyway).
in fact, being logged into iSpot is not enough to be logged in to the forums. I can be logged in to iSpot but if I then want to make a comment on a forum I must then log in to the forum AS WELL.
which is one thing. but then, logging in to a forum automatically logs me into iSpot as well. which is okay, I suppose, but, doesn’t really make sense.
As I’ve already noted elsewhere, for this reason I can no longer use iSpot on my Android devices. Only my desktop (which is older) can access either the observations or forum.
I totally agree with you that it is nonsensical to require a separate log-in for the forum.
This is fairly common practise ‘in the field’ - NBN for example
Common practice, maybe, but still, to my mind, otiose in this instance.
See https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/735027/italian-wall-lizard and https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/735030/nine-spotted-moth. Last time I checked Croatia was not in the UK.
“undergoing in-depth technical work behind the scenes” - iSpot changes coming: don't get left out! | News | UK and Ireland | iSpot Nature
and News | Global | Page 1 | iSpot Nature
iSpot is crumbling - has crumbled.
There appears to be NO effort from the Admin Team to acknowledge that things are going terribly wrong - the things scattered through these Forums.
There are so many errors of programming that the site is becoming more dysfunctional by the day.
Likely Banners and Dictionaries (surely the backbone of iSpot) are functioning poorly, Agreements are rarer than ever, supportive comments are few and far between and News from Admin hardly promising.
I entered a new ID to get taxonomy links present as @Jo_Parmenter had the botanical and vernacular names reversed (https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/735087/growing-by-wall). It is now showing links for Senecio aquaticus rather than Senecio, which by coincidence or otherwise is what was temporarilly in the scientific name field due to a list of alternatives popping up while I trying to press the mouse button on the vernacular name field.
yes…i have had similar issues, particularly when you have something which you can’t ID to species level -there are sometimes ‘agg.’ options missing or in the case of Senecio, you know its a ragwort, but if you try entering ragwort as the English name it then undoes the Senecio you’d carefully entered under scientific name. Sigh…
When I try to get back to the top of this page to navigate elsewhere just as I;m about move the mouse to where I want to go the page then jumps back to part way down the scrollable thread, thus taking several attempts to get where I want t be.
Workround: Rather than using CTRL-HOME or the tab scrollbar, use the discourse scrollbar on the thread.(mouse drag only, I think).
Yep and it’s often fatal to force the Common name.
and you realize that if (a big IF) the bug is fixed, then this observation will still languish in the wrong community forever. Unless the curator is asked to fix it, in which case the url you gave above will be wrong and wont work anymore.
Who ever was responsible for the new design of the site and its urls clearly is incompetent.
This is a major bug! I thought that it had been fixed, but clearly not.
THE COMMON NAME MUST NEVER BE LINKED TO THE DICTIONARY: ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY THE SCIENTIFIC NAME.
This is a major BUG! it screws up the entire taxonomy and makes a mess of everything.
A classical example how how stupid and meaningless this is is using Painted Lady in the global community.
This bug was identified as such in Sept 2014 with the merger, and has never been fixed. I tried it and it seemed to work OK for the southern African dictionary, but clearly I did not test it thoroughly enough
Clearly the Open University does not care for any data integrity and is happy to publish garbage for use by scientists and conservationists. For 3 years this bug was ignored: I wonder for how many more …
Wait: the bug is in the display of the links.
The connection to the dictionary and thus to the filters and outside world is correct.
But the bug in the links is still operational. I wonder what outsiders think when they see these bugs?
But note!!! senecio is incorrect - it MUST be Senecio
But we cannot expect laymen to know all these rules. This is something that iSpot should trap and fix (with a little message for the user to help educate them about using scientific names - “Are you meaning the genus “Senecio”: taxa above species rank must always begin with a capital letter”).
Another day, another bug.
Earlier today I posted an observation of what I think is Metoecus paradoxus. Because we’ve lost the Changes feature I had to do a search for Metoecus paradoxus to try to find my observation. I got 9 hits but none of them were mine. Browsing through the gallery shows that my observation is still there.Why did a search not find it?
That search facility is completely dysfunctional. for me. It is really HOPELESS, I cannot find anything or anyone I look for. We may need some lessons on how to use search properly.
More please!! You dont give enough information. I cannot check anything.
So you posted this: https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/735237/wasp-nest-beetle-metoecus-paradoxus
And you wanted to do a search to find it.
On the old iSpot you could have done a dictionary search. Simple
https://www.ispotnature.org/species-dictionaries/uksi/metoecus%20paradoxus
but unless you know that it is coded NBNSYS0000024934 you could not do that on this new site. So you cannot just invoke
https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/species-dictionary/NBNSYS0000024934/metoecus-paradoxus/observations
to discover that there are 10 observations for the species.
Now your search, should yield all 10. But the google search does not work very well.
The All tab finds 9 (but most of these are from the old iSpot - most are 404 page not found)
The ID tab only finds 1 (https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.ispotnature.org/node/199785&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwivlenluKXVAhWMIsAKHVxjAHkQFggFMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNH93OeT2HwtI-cf0-mOzAKv0nHfFQ) - posted on the old site on 13 Aug 2011 and linking to the new site.
The taxonomy tab finds nothing
(dont expect anything in projects or users: and nothing shows up)
So!!! If nothing else your observation allows us to test the SEARCH on iSpot and find it nearly useless!
I wonder how it was expected to work?
No! If is not you. It is the iSpot programmers. Clearly they have messed up spectacularly.
Why can one not find iSpot if one googles???
It has been suggested that it is just that Google has not had time to map all the pages.
But iSpot has been up as a new site for a month now. And still Google has not mapped the pages - even those that have been up for three weeks…
I suspect something has been done to stop Google from mapping the pages.
But now the brainwave: Why dont we get Google to do the searches on iSpot!!!
Ergo sum: what we have now. NO SEARCH EITHER. (i.e. no TRACKS, no CHANGES, no SEARCH).
A totally dysfunctional site!
What I dont understand is why they use Google for the dictionary search (the taxonomy tab). Surely it is merely the stem https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/ &the-community-of-the-user & “/species-dictionary/” with &Dictionary-number-of-the-community-dictionary &taxon-name
Quite trivial to code - so why bother with google at all?
Or is the new urls with the dictionary numbers too complicated?
1 Like
Tony
I’m a simple soul. If I see on the UK and Ireland home page a box titled “Search iSpot” I expect to be able to type in my search term (Metoecus paradoxus), press Go and be presented with all occurrences of my search term within iSpot. I’ve just done it again and still, for me, only 9 hits: my observation from yesterday (https://www.ispotnature.org/communities/uk-and-ireland/view/observation/735237/wasp-nest-beetle-metoecus-paradoxus) is missing from the search results.
I also tried to find it by doing a search for my user name, Thistle, and looking under the Users tab in the results: “No Results”.
The search of a large database is certainly done quickly … but it’s useless if it’s inaccurate.